The union membership rate is at its lowest percentage on record, and the percentage of paid workers who were members of a union decreased to 10.1% in 2022 from 10.3% in 2021, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The number of wage and salary-earning workers belonging to unions in 2022 was 14.3 million, however, which was an increase of 273,000 people, or 1.9%, from 2021. The reason for the apparent discrepancy, the bureau said, is that there were 5.3 million more workers (3.9%) in 2022, and most of them were not union members.
Among the states, Hawaii and New York had the highest union membership rates in 2022, at 21.9% and 20.7%, respectively. South Carolina and North Carolina had the lowest rates, at 1.7% and 2.8%, respectively.
Thirty states and Washington, DC, had union membership rates below the national average, whereas 19 states had rates above it, and one state (New Hampshire) had the same rate. All states in both the East South Central and West South Central geographic regions had union membership rates below the national average, whereas all states in the Middle Atlantic and Pacific regions had rates above it. (See the tables here for more information.)
The unionization rate for women decreased by 0.3 percentage points year-over-year, to 9.6%, in 2022, whereas the rate for men was little changed at 10.5%, according to the data. The number of women who were union members, at 6.5 million, changed little from 2021 to 2022, whereas the number of men who were union members increased by 248,000 to 7.8 million.
In 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1%, and there were 17.7 million union workers, according to the BLS.
The presence of a labor union in nursing homes has been linked to lower COVID-19 mortality rates among residents and fewer infections among workers. Labor unionization among healthcare workers has remained low, however, according to a study published Dec. 27 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
